Transpo Trolley has passengers, but not very many

Some riders say they depend on it; others say they are infrequent users.

Some riders say they depend on it; others say they are infrequent users.

July 30, 2006|NANCY J. SULOK Tribune Columnist

John Boyer, whose wife owns the Mole Hole, is curious about the Transpo Trolley. The small bus passes the gift shop many times a day, he wrote in an e-mail, but "I rarely see anyone riding these trolleys.'' Boyer was one of the readers who answered my invitation to submit questions about "Why'd they do that?'' I said I would try to get answers. "I wonder,'' Boyer wrote, "just what are the number of riders and what the costs of operation of these trolleys are. As I am one of the taxpayers subsidizing the bus company, is the lack of ridership worth the trouble?'' According to Mary McLain, general manager of Transpo, 29,962 trips were taken aboard the downtown trolley during 2005. An additional 7,129 trips were taken during two Downtown South Bend Inc. special events in 2005, she said. So I did the math. McLain said the trolley runs from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. five days a week. That means it runs roughly 260 days a year, for 14 hours a day. Divide 29,962 trips by 260 days and you get an average of 115 trips a day. Divide that by 14 hours, and you get eight trips an hour. I decided to hop on the picturesque blue trolley for an hour and see if the averages panned out. I flagged down the trolley at 3:34 p.m. Tuesday at the southeast corner of Colfax Avenue and Main Street. Although nothing marked the corner as a trolley stop, the Transpo Web site has a map of the trolley route and stops. McLain said plans are under way to mark the route with signs, and one already is in place at South Street Station. She said Transpo is working with DTSB to see if alterations are needed in the route, and signs will be placed when that question is answered. The signs will have information about the routes and schedules, she said. I plunked a quarter in the coin box and took a seat behind driver Mark Stevens. A pleasant fellow who wears his hair on his chin, not his pate, Stevens said he has been a driver for two years. At first, I was the only passenger. But after the trolley wound its way though downtown to the South Street Station, Tom "Buffalo'' Roush joined me, clutching a bottle of Dasani water. He was going to visit a friend on the north side of downtown. On Navarre Street, Jacquelyn Gorden slid onto one of the varnished wooden seats. She had just finished her shift at Memorial Hospital and was going to South Street Station to catch a bigger bus for home. "I'm glad they have the trolley,'' Gorden said, explaining that it saves time for her. She praised the drivers for their friendly, helpful attitudes. One day, she said, a person in a wheelchair got on the bus and the driver helped push back a seat and anchor the wheelchair to the floor. By this time we were back at Colfax and Main, so I dropped another quarter in the box. A man flagged down the driver at Main and Wayne streets. He and a woman entered the trolley. James Boyd said he depends on it almost every to go from his job at O'Sullivan's Crossing restaurant to the South Street Station, where he's just in time to catch the No. 4 for home. If he walked the three blocks from work to the bus station, he said, he would miss the bus. Three passengers enter the bus at South Street Station, including a mother and son who were using the trolley as a pseudo-ambulance. They didn't want to give me their names, but the son said he had a bad itch on his arm. They were riding the trolley to Memorial Hospital's emergency room. The other passenger was Maria Rocio. She had just gotten off work at Goodwill. She was going to the Water Works at Main and Colfax. After thanking Stevens for a pleasant hour on the trolley, I got off with Rocio at 4:23 p.m. I was on the trolley for 49 minutes, and seven other passengers had ridden parts of the trip with me. We matched the 8-passengers-per-hour average. Bottom line: People do use the trolley, some of them depending on it. But not very many. *** Ken Hebard called last week to set the record straight on the new administration building for the South Bend Community School Corp. I quoted a reader in my July 24 column who wondered by the most visible side of the building, the side that faces the downtown area, is mostly a blank, windowless wall. Hebard, president of Hebard & Hebard Architects Inc., noted that the building was an existing structure that was stripped down to its cast-in-place concrete frame, which is crisscrossed with cables. Because of low floor heights and other issues, Hebard said, it would have been extremely difficult to relocate stairwells, utilities and other things that are behind the blank wall. Also, he noted, the original building, which was an annex to the former St. Joseph Bank Building, had windows on the south and west sides, even if one side was across the alley from a parking garage and the other was across an alley from the back wall of a former department store. Regardless of the view, Hebard said, there isn't an office worker in the world who would give up a window to check the weather. "We worked the best we could with what we had," he said. Nancy J. Sulok's columns appear on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. You can reach her at nsulok@sbtinfo.com, or by writing c/o South Bend Tribune, 225 W. Colfax Ave., South Bend, IN 46626, telephone (574) 235-6234.